Freedom To Ignore

So I found myself at the Reason Magazine website this morning, came across the following article: Bourgeois Libertarianism Could Save America, by Reason senior editor Brian Doherty. If you understand the broad strokes of American Libertarianism, once you've read the introduction to the piece, you'll pretty much know exactly where it's going to go.

And in such, it illustrates the primary problem that Libertarianism has with reaching outside of the relatively affluent, older and white base that it has. It often appears to openly pick sides. Mr. Doherty notes: "As this year's urban unrest has shown, police power in the conventional sense can't keep cities secure if even a small number of people are unwilling to play by the nonviolent rules." My question is this: Why does "urban unrest" show this? There's also an article from the December issue, titled "Predictive Policing or Targeted Harassment?" Why not use a police policy that a former officer describes as: "Make their lives miserable until they move or sue," as an example of being "unwilling to play by the nonviolent rules?" Why not use the murder of Matthew Shepard for that example? Even if, as some at Reason did, one decides that his murder was not motivated by homophobia but by a drug deal gone bad, that's no better reason for violence.

The irony here is that this is what Libertarianism is supposed to be all about. If one understands the Black Lives Matter and Anti-Fascist protests as being reactions to the activities of a State that is "recalcitrantly evil," then the way to end the "vandalism, arson, and assault against bystanders," is to tell people what they can do in order to be allowed "to possess wealth and space and to use them to offer goods and services for a price, helping others while peacefully bettering ourselves," in the face of a system that they feel deliberately deprives them of this, and that many Libertarians seem intent on ignoring.

The problem with Mr. Doherty's conceptualization of "boring old bourgeois Libertariansm: the lived philosophy of peacefully enjoying life and property while mostly minding your own business" is not that it doesn't leave room for "attempts to enforce orthodoxies of thought and expression, no matter how good the cause," but that it doesn't offer any responsibility to assist those who are subjected to such enforcement efforts. As someone "minding my own business" I am completely free to ignore people's pleas for justice. As much as "no justice, no peace" is openly extortionate, it is so because of the widespread idea that all that is needed for injustice to triumph is for enough would-be Libertarians to do nothing.

As long as bourgeois Libertariansm is viewed as the lived philosophy of treating violent interference with others enjoying life and property as none of one's business, it's going to have trouble gaining traction with the very people it claims to be attempting to appeal to. An insistence that if the state can openly oppress Dick without troubling Jane that Dick's response must also leave Jane untroubled presupposes that Dick needs nothing from Jane and Jane has nothing of assistance to Dick. So how, then, does bourgeois Libertariansm help anyone, if it's to be applied at the end of a chain of injustice, rather than the start?